As we get closer to the start of classes, I’m writing with two important reminders about your course Quercus pages. These reminders are particularly important this year since so much of our instruction will be online.
1. Publishing Your Course
You’ll recall from an email I sent earlier this week that you ought to have your course’s Zoom link posted on your course Quercus page, so that remote students will be able to access your course.
Of course, to see the Zoom link, the students will need to see the Quercus page. So you need to publish it. That one is easy. When you log into Quercus your course will have a big button on it that says “Publish.” You’ll see it on your own main Quercus landing page, thus:
To publish the course, you click the button that says publish. As I said, this one is easy.
2. Making the Course Public / Available to Students on the waitlist
For Upper-Year classes, there is another step that you should take.
Remember that, almost universally, there will be students on the waitlist of your course during the add-drop period. These students may want to participate in class while they are on the waitlist in hopes that they will eventually get a spot in the course. Unlike a normal year, the only way they will be able to do so is online: students on the waitlist cannot attend classes in person. So it is super important that these students be able to access the zoom link for your course. But since they are not in the course, they cannot access that link on the course Quercus page. What to do? You have a few options:
a) If you don’t have much information posted on Quercus beyond the zoom link, one thing you can do is just send that link to students who contact you and ask to sit in on the class while they’re on the waitlist. Again if you choose this option, the students you share the link with won’t be able to see the Quercus page, which may not be ideal.
You may, however, want to proceed slightly differently, in particular if you have information posted on the Quercus page beyond the zoom link that students may want to access while they are on the waitlist. To do that you can either
b) Make your course available to the public. That way, any student can view the Quercus page and get access to the zoom link as well as see whatever else you’ve posted on Quercus. (If you choose this option, I’d recommend changing the course back from public to private at the end of add-drop.)
c) Alternatively you can admit individual students to the course Quercus page when they write to ask you to do so. This is like (a) in that it works on a case-by-case basis but like (b) in that it gives access to all the materials on Quercus.
Options (b) and (c) are complex enough that I don’t want to put the instructions into the body of the email. I’ve attached some instructions in a word document that Susan Barker prepared last year.
Finally, if you’re having trouble with these steps, you can contact Bernadette or Cathy in the Associate Dean’s Office for assistance. And don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any questions or concerns about any of this.
